Team Ninja: Ready For More

In
terms of Sony's help, have you found that the development tools are now mature
enough? That's been a complaint, that it took some time for Sony to get that
support there.

Have you gotten to the point where you've gotten comfortable
with the platform and you feel that it's mature enough to make an original game,
and the kind that you want to make?

YH: Yeah. The cooperation that Sony has
been lending to the developers has been good so far. We're very satisfied.

For
any developer that's been working on all of the platforms that are available
today, I think they would agree that the PlayStation 3 is the most powerful
system out there.

The
current business model for most publishers, because of the cost of developing
games, is to make a game on both the PS3 and the 360, so there's some
compromises that have to be made.

Do you think that, in the future, we're going
to see games that are exclusively for the PS3 that are better than 360 games?
Because, as you said, it's the most powerful system out there.

YH: I agree that if we work exclusively
with one console that the final product will be a better game than if we were
to create it simultaneously for multiple platforms.

Each system has its own
philosophy behind it, so it's a matter if you can concentrate and focus 100
percent to adapt to that, or if you're going to have to balance that out with
other titles. So, definitely, yes.

And
that's something that Team Ninja has done for years. I don't know if that's a
philosophy that everyone at the team shares -- to concentrate on one piece of
hardware and make the best possible game. Do you think that that's a plan that
will continue onward?

YH: The future objective of Team Ninja --
one of our goals is to keep our current fan base and user base, and be able to
respond to their expectations and produce exciting content for them, but to
also grow a brand new audience.

So looking at that audience, we want to make
sure that we provide the most exciting entertainment content.

If that lends to one console -- PS3, or if
that's going to be the Wii -- that's just the direction we will go. It doesn't
necessarily mean that I'm just in favor of the PS3 console and that I'm not
going to work on the 360, but it really depends on the audience and what we
want to deliver, in order to make the most entertaining content.